Abstract

Friday, April 8, 2016

Directionally impaired

A few
months ago I interviewed Dr. Keith Vossel, a researcher at the University of
California, San Francisco. The subject was the link between Alzheimer’s and
seizures, but I also became acquainted through Vossel with the Morris water maze,
developed by Richard Morris in the 1980s. Over time, Morris’s invention made it
possible to use genetically modified mice that were showing symptoms of
Alzheimer’s, based on their ineptitude in finding food pellets in a maze that other
mice could locate with ease. “A normal mouse pretty much knows where the pellet
is,” Vossel said during a televised forum on music, art, and creativity. “The
Alzheimer’s mouse is swimming around, not really knowing where it’s going.”

Absent-mindedness and a poor sense of direction have been lifelong
companions of mine. In elementary school I was well-known for leaving my coat
on the school’s playgrounds. And in adulthood, my directional skills have been
consistently weak. On a trip to New York City with a couple of friends in the
mid-1980s, I managed to lead us late at night directly into the heart of the
Brooklyn neighborhood Bedford-Stuyvesant. Why did we know this could be a dicey
place for us white guys? Because we learned so as teenagers from the Billy Joel
song: I’ve been stranded in the combat
zone/I walked through Bedford-Stuy alone. We reversed course immediately.

Almost three decades later, when my son started college at
George Washington University, Paula and I began making the road trip to D.C.
twice a year. Typically, we drove together, but in the last two years I made
the drive on my own. In the spring of 2014, this almost led to a debacle.

I plugged Andryc’s dorm address into my GPS unit, and
that’s when the problems began. Why was I being told to follow a southeast
path, when Andryc’s dorm was in the city’s northwest quadrant? Soon I crossed
over the Anacostia River, and then it was clear that my GPS had betrayed me. I
drove around in a circle in Anacostia’s commercial district, and the voice in
the machine kept telling me to make a U-turn. Fortunately, it was still
daylight, a gorgeous spring evening. I stopped to ask for directions from an
African-American family grilling meat in their front yard, and soon I was heading
across a bridge toward the Capitol.

My troubles were just beginning. I could see the Capitol,
and I knew I was moving toward it. But when I got closer to the massive
edifice, it seemed that everything was blocked with bollards or one-way
streets.

Was I moving in the correct direction? I wasn’t sure. Compounding
my worries was that Andryc’s dorm was tricky to find—close to the Watergate
hotel, but easier to get to by foot than by car. Eventually, I found a place to
park, in the hope that I was within walking distance of his dorm. It was then
that I realized my phone was almost out of juice. I called him, and was much
relieved to learn that, yes, my car was within walking distance. Ten minutes
later, there he was, my grown-up son, more in control of the situation than I
was.

A year later, our hook-up went smoothly. But on the drive
back home, I grasped that this would be my last drive of this length in such a
short time—almost 1,000 miles in 36 hours. After stopping in Danbury,
Connecticut, where we fortified ourselves at an excellent Brazilian buffet, dusk
gave way to darkness. When I reentered Interstate 84, I’d lost my nerve. It was
as if my rear-view mirror had been transformed into a video game, the kind with
malevolent intent. Cars coming up behind us were especially unnerving. Was it
just a matter of time that someone would collide with my Toyota Matrix from
behind, splitting the car in half? Never have I been more relieved to reach the
orderly calm of the Massachusetts Turnpike. I knew that I’d never again drive
such a distance in such a short time.